In bringing up our children, whether in the West or anywhere else, our goal should evidently be to help them get the best in this world and the best in the hereafter - success and happiness in this life and salvation and paradise in the hereafter. This means that we should help our children successfully pursue necessary study and/or training leading to a profession and also to provide them whatever they need to become good Muslims.

Commanding the proper and forbidding the improper (amr bi alma 'ruf wa nahi 'an alnunkar) is one of the most important Islamic principles, stressed again and again in the Qur'an and Hadith. Indeed, from one point of view this principle can be seen as the most important Islamic principle; for, if this principle is duly practiced in the Ummah, then, as a result, all other teachings of Islam will also be practiced, while if this one principle is ignored then the rest of Islam will also gradually come to be ignored.

One characteristic of our technological age is that humans can now do things at a massive scale never before possible or even imaginable. This capability makes possible the achievement of some highly beneficial tasks but, if proper care is not taken, it can also inflict massive damage on living creatures including humans themselves, a damage from which it may be extremely difficult, if not impossible to recover. The pollution of air and water at a large scale with extinction or near extinction of some species and diminishing ozone layer with a potentially dangerous global warming make this point with particular clarity. To the extent that the survival of human beings themselves depends on a careful use of our technological and industrial power one would expect that we would be convinced of such carefulness without much difficulty. Yet in the past people concerned with the environment have encountered a great deal of insensitivity. This might be in part due to some inevitable ambiguity of the evidence used to point out the dangers to the environment but it was mostly due to some deep-rooted attitudes.

Eid days are meant to be occasions when the Muslims of an entire town join together in prayer and in thanking Allah for His blessings, in rejoicing at the great religious traditions of Islam and in forgiving one another for any personal excesses we may have committed towards one another. But, alas, over the past many years these occasions have been marred by differences among our organizations over when should Eids be celebrated.